6/29/03

Yesterday we had a meeting of the Books & Pie club, and I volunteered to make the pie. So that's what I did that morning:

It looks easy, doesn't it? But making a pie is actually a lot of work! Here's what I did:

1. Change out of cute outfit and into old, oversized Bay To Breakers t-shirt. This is going to get messy.

2. Make trip to convenience store to pick up essential ingredient I forgot to buy at the grocery store. This time, the ingredient was flour. Have to go to three different stores before I find one that sells flour (well, OK, Korean market sells rice flour, but didn't think that would work too well).

3. Combine ingredients for pie filling. Immediately afterward, realize, to my horror, that pie filling recipe I have been using is an older, faulty version I got from my mother that contains tenfold too much flour and no sugar. (note: I used this version of the recipe for years and tormented myself about the fact that my pies were not nearly as good as mom's. Realized why last Christmas when I helped her make pies at home and got a peek at the original recipe. Mom claims that faulty version of recipe was an honest mistake. I have my doubts.) Stand around for a few minutes debating whether to start over again or to try to salvage what I have. Decide to go the salvage route, as starting from scratch would be wasteful and require another trip to the store. Add sugar to the batter. Taste it. Tastes OK, but maybe a little bitter from all that extra flour and also not the right texture. Oh well, at least these people are your friends.

4. Peel and chop apples for what seems like hours. This is my least favorite part of making pie. My mom usually farms this task out to my dad. Realize that this is another of the drawbacks of being single.

5. Put away flour in cabinet and manage to spill it all over cabinet, self and floor. Good thing I changed out of the cute outfit.

6. Take pie out of oven and admire its beauty! Hope it tastes OK, too.

The other members of the club showed up later that afternoon, and we started with the pie. It was OK, I though, although not quite as good as usual. Everyone else claimed to like it, though.

Then we moved on to the books. Ian brought two books: The Shy Little Kitten, which was to be the main focus of our discussion, and also the book he stole from the orphans, The Dog Who Thought He Was a Boy. I also provided a book I'd found in the street, The Doll Who Ate His Mother, which was not a children's book, but which I felt would be a good fit for Books & Pie just because of the title.

We started by discussing The Shy Little Kitten, which, we determined, did not actually address the concept of shyness at all, but was instead a thinly-disguised parable about Nazism and Communism. Overall, we didn't care for the book--the title was misleading, the message was a potentially dangerous one, and the illustrations of the little black puppy were really weird.

We then went on to discuss The Dog Who Thought He Was a Boy. We didn't read the whole thing, because it was pretty long, but we did admire the psychedelic, perspective-challenged illustrations while Ian gave us a synopsis. This book was primarily about drug use, the fact that dogs are smarter than people, and also about why it is better to be a dog than to be human.

Finally, Mo gave a dramatic reading from The Doll Who Ate His Mother, and also read aloud to us from the list of vocabulary words a previous owner had left tucked inside the book. And then we had some drinks and I put on one of my DJ Enki CDs and everybody just started dancing. To my knowledge, this was the first meeting of the Books & Pie club that featured spontaneous dancing, but I think it deserves to become a new tradition.

Afterwards, we ate, we watched part of Zoolander, and we tried to watch Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, but it was sold out. So, of course, we ended up at the bar as we seem to do so often. The cranky bartender was as cranky as I'd ever seen him, largely thanks to the presence of a group of people celebrating a birthday. "Do me a favor," he yelled at them, "the next time you have a birthday, go to McDonald's!" "Ohhhhh, you're that cranky bartender," I teased him. "I've heard about you!"

We go to that bar on a fairly regular basis, but we're never really sure if the bartender remembers us or if he just finds us vaguely familiar. Or if it's just that, as Jen opined, "we go there and act like regulars, so he treats us like regulars." So, I was kind of surprised when he greeted me by saying "you're looking better!" In fact, I was so stunned that I didn't even think to ask him what he meant by that. But he was right, and I guess more perceptive than I thought. Later, Mo agreed that a few weeks ago, I'd had a palpable aura of misery that is now gone. And I thought I was hiding it so well...

We didn't stick around for too long at the bar, partly because we were tired, and also because a creepy homophobic carpet-layer from Anaheim named Bob sat down next to us and kept giving me and Jen the creepiest stare ever. His eyes were burning holes in the sides of our heads, so we decided it was time to go home.

More pictures from Books & Pie.